Weights and Measures

[steepholm]

I posted a few days ago about Nelson's hat size. Today, we have Byron's dieting programme. Thank goodness for the record-keeping tradesmen of St James! People who'd just bought a hat at Locks could nip round the corner to have themselves weighed on the scales of Berry Bros & Rudd, whose primary business was selling wine.

Louise Foxcroft's Calories and Corsets, from which this comes (I think), looks as if it may be an interesting book. I'm glad at any rate to have been introduced to the Size 0 Empress of Austria:

She exercised vigorously, resembling an outlandish bird as she hung from gymnastic rings in a black ostrich feather-trimmed gown. She also swallowed only emetics, laxatives, oranges, and thin broth or one glass of milk from her own personal cow.

Roll over Cleopatra, and tell Semiramis the news.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Presumably Franz Josef's wife, Sissi? She was very much the Diana of her day with many of the same issues and the same post mortem adulation after her assassination, some of which continues to this day.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The same.

[owlfish]

I am so glad you clarified this. Sissi is legend in Italy, while growing up, I had otherwise never heard of her. I never really read enough about her to be able to recognize her, say, in this context.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise you grew up in Italy!

[owlfish]

Not really, but a smidgin. The year I was three. (The only year in which I was really fluent in Italian!) Lots of teenage summers. Most of my summers and winter holidays during university. Lots of vacations since then.

Really, I was unclear. In Italy, she is legend. In all other parts of my growing up elsewhere, I had not heard of her.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

She's well remembered in Austria too, with a very Diana like style of adulation. She met a similarly tragic death at a young age and had many of the same personal problems and was very much the same sort of media creation. However, unlike Diana, her husband adored her and was broken by her death, which may explain a great deal about the older Franz Josef.